Erotic homage unveiled at Venice
(Agencies)
Updated: 2004-09-11 09:07

Filmmaking greats Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh and Wong Kar Wai unveiled at the Venice Film Festival on Friday their seductive trilogy "Eros," devoted to eroticism and desire.

Antonioni's story is the most sexually explicit of the trilogy.

In the film, which is also a homage to the ailing 91-year-old Antonioni by the two internationally acclaimed young directors, each takes a unique approach to the theme in separate vignettes.

"What motivated me to do this film was Michelangelo Antonioni, who had been the guiding light for me and filmmakers of my generation," said Kar Wai, creator of the sci-fi romance "2046" and arthouse favourite "In the Mood for Love."

In the first vignette, "The Hand," Hong Kong's Kar Wai weaves an erotic story about a tailor and a courtesan played by Gong Li with sumptuous images and rainy, dark sets.

Soderbergh's "Equilibrium," on the other hand, is a perverse comedy starring Robert Downey Jr. as a 1950s New York ad agent who visits a psychiatrist to unravel his mysterious erotic dreams and unblock his creativity.

Initially, Spain's Pedro Almodovar had been lined up to take part in the project, but in the end, the award-winning U.S. director of "Traffic" and "Sex, Lies and Videotape" stepped in.

"I wanted my name on a poster with Michelangelo Antonioni," an irreverent Soderbergh said in the production notes.

Antonioni and his wife, Enrica Fico, in 2002

Finally, Antonioni, one of Italy's most influential film directors and the cinematic father of modern angst and alienation, offers a meditation on the gap between men and women in "The Dangerous Thread of Things."

The story is set in the beautiful Tuscan countryside and is the most sexually explicit of the three stories.

Antonioni's 60-year career includes Oscar-nominated "Blowup" and the internationally acclaimed "L'Avventura" (The Adventure).

Despite a crippling stroke in 1983 which robbed him of his speech, the Italian director is still working.

"It was very exciting to work with all those people who made this film. Thanks for having given Michelangelo many days of life," said his wife Enrica.

Antonioni's deliberately slow-moving and oblique movies are not always crowd pleasers, but films such as "L'Avventura" turned him into an icon for directors like Kar Wai and Martin Scorsese, who has described him as a poet with a camera.

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